When we talk about Detroit, we get used to look at house repair, downtown development, road construction, local business, but there is a crucial part easy to be forgotten: education. When I read the news about Detroit public school, I was shocked by “Only 5 percent of fourth-graders were proficient in math on 2015 national tests, and 6 percent were proficient in reading.” While American politicians mentioned thousands of times “education” when they campaign, while United States is the country that pays more attention to education than most of countries in the world, Detroit stills has very bad education system.

As the articles mentioned, Detroit has its own singular situation. Other cities and states can reduce cost in other part and put money to promote education, Detroit has all problems at the same time: economic collapse, population losses, financial crisis. Detroit can’t be very smart about the money transaction. Even teachers stopped sickout, the bad school house condition and the short of money can still put students away.

And from the teachers’ perspective, I can also feel their concerns. According to kindergarten teacher Jennifer Jackson, she “loves teaching but she is tired to fight”. When they put time and effort to educate students, they work for their belief that they can bring students knowledge and get them out of property to explore the other side of life, but they cannot be paid well to support their own families.

This sickout aims to increase teachers’ salaries in Detroit, but as the title mentioned: “Detroit teachers head back to work, but education crisis remains unresolved”. Then it made me think about what I am doing for Detroit Food Academy. Since it is very hard for government to improve all education system as the same time, social startups can play an important role in helping students. I am working with summer curriculum for student employees. It contains three parts: kitchen101, business101 and personal development101. We design the curriculum not just for guiding them to work for Small Batch; instead, we want to teach them about serve safe, kitchen standard of operation, business operation, social marketing, sales, lot tracking, presentation skills, personal accountability and life guide. We aim to teach them skills they can use in their life, help them form good studying habits and open their minds about the whole world.

We cannot say the effort we are doing can change the whole education situation in short time, but Detroit needs small effort that altogether creates progress. Kids are the future of Detroit and we are responsible to make our future better.